In devising the character of Macias the Italian author had made use of a traditional Spanish type, which has its historical sources, and has inspired many a Spanish poet from the fifteenth century downwards.  Macias is knight, poet, and lover; his love is a kind of southern madness which withers every other feeling in its neighbourhood, and his tragic death is the only natural ending to a career so fierce and uncontrolled.  Elvira, with whom Macias is in love, the daughter of Nuno Fernandez, is embodied gentleness and virtue, until the fierce progress of her fate has taught her that men are treacherous and the world cruel.  For her love had been prosperous and smooth until, by a series of events, it had been brought into antagonism with two opposing interests—­those of her father and of a certain Fernan Perez, the tool and favourite of the powerful Duke of Villena.  The ambition and selfish passion of these two men are enlisted against her.  Perez is determined to marry her; her father is determined to sweep Macias out of the path of his own political advancement.  The intrigue devised between the two is perfectly successful.  Macias is enticed away; Elvira, forced to believe that she is deserted and betrayed, is half driven, half entrapped, into a marriage with Perez; and Macias, returning to claim her against a hundred obstacles, meets the wedding party on their way back to the palace of the Duke.  The rest of the play represented, of course, the struggle between the contending forces thus developed.  In plan and mechanism the story was one of a common romantic type, neither better nor worse than hundreds of others of which the literary archives of the first half of the present century are full.  It required all the aid that fine literary treatment could give it to raise it above the level of vulgar melodrama and turn it into tragedy.  But fortune had been kind to it; the subject had been already handled in the Italian sketch with delicacy and a true tragic insight, and Edward Wallace had brought all the resources of a very evenly-trained and critical mind to bear upon his task.  It could hardly have been foreseen that he would be attracted by the subject, but once at work upon it he had worked with enthusiasm.

The curtain drew up on the great hall of the Villena Palace.  Everything that antiquarian knowledge could do had been brought to bear upon the surroundings of the scene; the delicate tilework of the walls and floor, the leather hangings, the tapestries, the carved wood and brass work of a Spanish palace of the fifteenth century, had been copied with lavish magnificence; and the crowded expectant house divided its attention and applause during the first scene between the beauty and elaboration of its setting and the play of the two tolerable actors who represented Elvira’s father and the rival of Macias, Fernan Perez.

Fernan Perez, having set the intrigue on foot which is to wreck the love of Macias and Elvira, had just risen from his seat, when Wallace, who was watching the stage in a torment of mingled satisfaction and despair, touched Madame de Chateauvieux’s arm.